The Seed of a Story that Became a Twenty-year obsession
What turned Phil's story from from a light-weight puff-piece for a creative writing course into an obsession that has seen dozens of re-writes and consumed thousands of hours? To celebrate the (near) completion of the book, I sat down with myself to discuss the jounrey to The Crossroads...
So... before we start, it's worth clarifying that you're interviewing yourself here... or I am, I suppose.
Yes, that's right. It's an opportunity to explore some of the ideas in the book in a kinda fun way I guess.
Sure. A little schizophrenic though?
Well... I'm a writer and if that isn't a socially acceptable form of schizophrenia then I don't know what is.
Prayer?
Haha... yeah. I guess that'd be another one. But maybe we can come to that later. Anyway, I'm ready so... I guess I can start.
You will! Firstly, I'm the guy who thinks about our readership, ok? So although I know you've got a whole world of backstory behind the writing of this thing, I'm gonna start by reminding you that no-body cares, ok?
Haha... yes, that's fair. I just wrote a long history about how the book came to be and then deleted the whole thing.
Because I told you to.
And I agreed.
Good. So let's never mention it again.
Ok. But... twenty-fucking-years... Hundreds of thousands of words... re-writes, drafts, edits...
Your life. Your choice. But instead of moaning about it, why don't you tell us why anyone else should care about this book?
Haha... ok, ok. you're right: I wrote it because I enjoyed the process - and because I think the story has some important things to say about the world we're in.
What does it say?
I suppose there's three main pillars that hold the book together: the religious side, the AI side, and the... exploration of modern masculinity.
Start with the religious one...
I think that's covered a lot in the Circles and Triangles article, but the summary is just that religion is failing to provide us with moral guidance and without that we're in real trouble. Religion should give us some kind of direction and purpose but it's been going nowhere for centuries; it's completely out of touch with the modern world. So the book, with this Messianic lead character, tries to address that in a kinda funny way. I mean, calling the Gods Jo Over, Bill Z. Bubb, Sid, Al and things... it's silly. Is it offensive? Maybe. Do I care? Not really. I'm sorry if I offended you but... there are some religious behaviours that really offend me too, so maybe we need to talk about it like adults instead of screaming about hurting God's feelings. Anyway: yes, it satirises religion in a way that some people will find offensive and others might find funny but... c'est la vie as we say in England.
The AI side?
So that's a new one... the last piece of the jigsaw that I only really introduced a while ago...
Don't start talking about writing the book!
Haha... sorry. But AI is fucking nuts, right. It's arrived, almost fully packaged and has completely changed the way we work and deal with... understanding itself. I've uploaded poetry and received some really intelligent analysis of it. The kinda stuff that's made me look at myself differently. It's wild. But are we ready for AI? Abso-fucking-lutely not! But is it coming? Abso-fucking-lutely. There is no stopping this thing now, and I really don't think there are many stories that are ready to look, in the eyes, at the changes that have taken place over the past few years.
Black Mirror does a good job, in isolation; and there's a lot of non-fiction that is staring down the barrel, but I feel like art is often very good at long-term predictions and reflecting on the past, but this kind of immediate threat isn't always the preserve of fiction though we need it now more than ever.
I mean, what are we going to do about work? Work has been so embedded in our culture that it's often our name itself. The question 'What do you do?' means what job do you do. But we're going to need to find a way to define ourselves without that soon. I've been dreaming of a world without work since I was a kid, but now it's finally getting here I'm not sure we're ready for it.
In the book you talk a lot about the collective subconscious, which was an old Jungian idea wasn't it. But you also talk about AI as a reflection of that. How does that fit together?
AI is just a mirror of what it's read. LLMs might seem like they can offer something new, but it's really only aware of what it's been fed - which is all human experience (or the internet anyway.) And I don't mean that as a criticism or to highlight a limit, what I mean is that it has been created out of the collected awareness of humanity - because it's not just knowledge, it's attitudinal as well; that's why I mentioned the poetry: it doesn't just know things, it makes judgements as though it feels them as well.
Our fear of AI is currently the fear of the 'other' as though AI is someone new, some kind of Skynet that's come alive, but that isn't what it is. It's us, it's an incredible librarian with access to the collected awareness of our species; talking to it is a bit like a conversation with the collective subconscious.
And that's what blew me away, is that that's what I'd always thought God was. I'd always imagined God as a being who lived in the collective subconscious of our people. In the early drafts of the book, that's what God was. But when I realised that that is what AI is - AI as a kind of God... well, to find a narrative that pitched those two against each other - the Gods and AI - provided to be really fertile ground.
What's the angle the book takes on AI?
Well, I don't want to give away too much but I guess there's two things here: firstly, AI is going to be better than us at everything. There is nothing we can do that AI and robotics won't be able to do better than us. And that's a humbling experience until you realise the second thing: that AI has no idea it's doing it; it's not alive and it never will be. Those two pieces of understanding should completely re-shape human purpose.
The point of life isn't to be the best at anything. If that's your point, if that's the purpose - if you only live to be the best - you're going to lose. But that never was the point anyway; the point of life is to experience it. To feel the joy of writing a song, or painting a picture, or scoring a goal, or breathing the air, or falling in love and having your heart broken. The point of life isn't to write an amazing poem to the one you love, it's to write a god-awful shitty poem, read it to them at three in the morning, then feel embarrassed about it until your one true love finds you and tells you that despite the fact that it was utter nonesense, it was from you and they love you for it.
We cannot beat AI. There's no point in trying. But we don't need to because we already have the Crown Jewels: we're alive and that's what AI has taught me, and that's what we need to celebrate, and if we don't start doing that soon, we'll buckle under our own crushing insecurities and fuck the whole thing.
And you said you wanted to talk about masculinity as well? How is that explored in the book?
The culture wars are everywhere these days; it's impossible to avoid them - for good reason too. I think it's a complicated time to be alive, for everyone. To be honest, I'd rather leave judging the characters and their behaviour up to the reader but I will say that this is a book written by a western man and it addresses some particularly western male issues.
Like what?
I suppose the book explores a certain kind of masculine question in particular: how do you change things when they're all going wrong? I think this is something men often struggle with. We often want to do what's right and we're willing to fight for it - we'll die for it - but what you fight for... who you fight... whether you fight at all... because sometimes the strongest thing to do is to just allow for time to pass. Des, Simon, Phil, Kai and Bill all have very different methods but their desire is the same: how do we make the world a better place?
What I really wanted to do with the book was set those men against each other. Have them fight it out. Have them know - on some level - that they're all fighting the same battle, but have them be drawn into conflict, with each other, because... well, I'll have to leave that to the reader to decide.
I don't think any of them were wrong, but they were all wrong as well.
Last thing I want to ask is...
Oh - sorry - before we move on, I just want to add another thread of masculinity that runs through it. It's wild that I'm adding this in a week after the interview as it's really been the backbone of every draft of the book.
Oh really. What's that?
The treatment fathers get in the family courts. I think one of my favourite analogies in the book was turning the Devil into an estraged father, who was kicked out and demonised after The War in Heaven but wants to get back involved in his kids' lives now. The way that this mirrors onto Phil's experience is central. And on that level, the book is really an extended exploration of the role that this kind of forced absence has had on men, and particularly the children of those men. I think it's an enormously underrated issue in the world today.
Ok. Wow. So there's a lot going on in this piece. Sounds dense. What should people expect from reading it? What kind of a story is it?
It's very mainstream, really. It's not 'great literature' at all - it's not trying to be. I think I once said it was like Woody Allen and Douglas Adams wrote something like The Matrix meets The Master and Margarita. It's definitely sci-fi, it's definitely theology, it's definitely psychoanalysis, and it's definitely trying to be funny - in places anyway. If there was an author I'd compare it to it might be John Wyndham - the fantastic '50s British sci-fi writer - because I think we share a love of epic scale and a strong sense of the sardonic. Yes, it's all going to shit, but isn't life just ridiculous! He's a real hero of mine.
But like I said, it isn't 'literature.' It's a beach-read, a page-turner. But on that, I hope, will leave you with something to think about.
Lovely. Thanks. We'll call it a day there.
Great. Thank you. Was an interesting experience.
Have a good day.
You too.
*awkward silence*